Robert Wasson’s background consists of formal training in geomorphology and geology, and self-training in natural resource management, environmental history, and integrative studies. From 1973 to 1983 he undertook doctoral and post-doctoral studies at Macquarie University, the University of Auckland, Monash University, the Australian National University, and the Physical Research Laboratory (India) where he focussed on past climates and landscapes of the Australian and Indian deserts. From 1983 to 1996 he conducted studies at CSIRO of river catchment processes, rates of change, and management options – here he become Assistant Chief Division of Water Resources. From 1996 to 2004 he was Head of the Department of Geography, Dean of Science, then Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (CRES) at ANU. Here his research focussed on catchments (including climate change aspects), people-nature relationships, and cross-disciplinary methods – in Australia, India and East Timor. Professor Wasson is active on several high level committees and advisory groups, both nationally and internationally, and has been responsible for some major international collaborative research efforts. In early 2004 Professor Wasson took on the role of Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory.

Environmental science's increasing sophistication or polarised posturing in blissful ignorance
by Robert Wasson

Session 2: Questions/discussion

I was given the remit of talking about environmental science. What I am going to do is to try to sketch some of the generic issues rather than try to go into any detail. But it has always struck me that this debate about environment and population is described by my subtitle, 'Polarised posturing in blissful ignorance', because an awful lot of polarisation that goes on is really posturing. In fact, the environmental sciences fall into that category.

A lot of what we see around us from environmental scientists is a linear view of the world that there is a linear relationship between population and impact on the environment. Yet some of the most insightful commentaries, criticisms and analyses of that relationship have actually been by environmental scientists who do not take the linear view of population and impact.

So, already and immediately, the polarised posturing which takes the view that environmental science is some sort of unreconstructed bunch of individuals who take a very, very simplistic view of the relationship is simply not the case – demonstrably not the case.

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One of the key analytical tools that has been used by environmental science, and by ecologists in particular, is the notion of carrying capacity. I decided to do a quick Web search the other day, just to see if it was still there, and it is everywhere. There are networks galore. The Carrying Capacity Network, for example, as recently as this year, set out the carrying capacity notion in the slide – which is, by the way, a somewhat different definition from most that ecologists use, but that is not an issue that I have time to get into now.

These networks are there. These people very much are using this sort of notion, the carrying capacity notion, which in its simplest form is really far too simple for the debate.

Notice that in the middle of that definition it says, 'The carrying capacity for any given area is not fixed. It can be altered by improved technology, but mostly it is changed for the worse by pressures which accompany a population increase.' In ecology, and at least in the earlier views of carrying capacity, the notion was very strongly one of intra-specific competition and, in a slightly more sophisticated form, resource-limited population, which is modelled as a logistic curve.

You can see immediately that, while the 'carrying capacity' words are there, it has actually been transmuted into something which is much more human, where technology is seen to be very largely a human affair – with the possible exception of chimpanzees and a few other species – and in fact things can be changed by humanity so the carrying capacity notion is not fixed. But the bottom line of this and many other groups is that, as population increases, carrying capacity decreases, after a particular threshold.

In Australia, it is fair to say, if we look at this kind of carrying capacity notion, that much of the environmental damage of the rural landscape was actually done very soon after European settlement – leaving aside the vexatious question of the relationship between Indigenous people and the non-human world – in southern Australia, at least, and really quite large-scale damage, which I do not have time to document now but most people in this room are familiar with it. It was a time when population was very low. Examples include clearing and biodiversity loss, soil erosion, the preconditions for dryland salinisation if not the salinisation itself, soil organic matter loss and structural change – and there are others.

All of those things happened within 50 years or so, to a large degree, and, to repeat, by a population in this case substantially European in origin and the population density was very low indeed.

More recently with high population there has been an increase in pollution, of waters in particular, and greenhouse gas emissions. The next speaker will talk about issues of that kind in much more detail than I can. So, as population has gone up, certainly there has been a rise in many of these issues.

The conclusion from these brief observations is that the population-carrying capacity relationship is dynamic, and counter to the simple equation that population numbers equals environmental damage, or population increase goes to environmental damage and carrying capacity decline. The historical record of Australia suggests otherwise.

Now, as I have already said, environmental science began with a simple view of carrying capacity that equated raw numbers of people with environmental damage. But this is an ahistorical view, as I have just tried to demonstrate. And some of you have heard me bang on about this before, that in fact history is an extraordinarily important component of our analysis of these relationships. If we simply look at the relationship now – taking, say, 10 years of data – we actually miss most of the dynamics. The historical component is crucially important to our understanding of these relationships. Environmental history, therefore, is something which to me should be centre stage to a lot of these analyses.

Yet it still happens: we see short-term views that are really deeply flawed. Considerable variation in the world's sustainable population, depending upon the assumptions that you make, and the starting population level at the time of the study actually are really quite interesting problems. If you try to estimate what the world's sustainable population could be, you get a very wide range of numbers, depending upon the assumptions and where you start the analysis.

Yet they have one thing in common: they are all below those of the medium estimates of population size in 2050, when it is believed the global population will stabilise. But this literature, interestingly, identifies two different sets of constraints. One is food, land and energy, and the other is fresh water, forest products and fertiliser. And there is almost no overlap between the two sets, which is very interesting. As a problem in analysis, there is a meta-problem of why it is that two really quite diverse, different groups of people have come up with two different sets of constraints.

A calculation that I heard recently portrayed was that if fossil fuels and fertiliser were removed from Australian agriculture, we could only support about 9 million people. The reason for picking out fossil fuels and fertiliser is that both of them are thoroughly unsustainable inputs to the Australian agricultural system. So if you remove the two substantially non-sustainable elements of our agriculture, then we can't do all that well – on our own; this assumes we are not importing anything.

But this is an example of environmental science ignoring technological innovation, values and lifestyle choices. I have just moved to Darwin, and I can tell you that the outreaches of the area around Darwin, despite all the agricultural experiments to the contrary, could support millions of people – but they would be peasants. But if you go to southern India, where the soils are very similar and the climate is very similar, it is entirely possible. It is a choice to do with lifestyles and wellbeing.

Also, environmental scientists have adopted a more sophisticated approach as time has gone by, but I would argue that in fact from early on in environmental science there was a lot of sophisticated analysis going on. For example, Barry Commoner, a biologist, gave us the equation that environmental impact equals population times consumption per person times impact per unit of consumption. We have the Ehrlich and Holden equation, environmental impact equals population times affluence times technology. These are not linear relationships of the kind that are used to characterise and caricature environmental science.

These equations and similar ones hold in the developed world. I would argue that now, as has been argued recently by Hollander, in the developing world poverty needs to be added to these equations. A book that has recently been published, and that I have only read about a third of, actually argues that poverty is the greatest threat to the world's non-human environment, not affluence, for the simple reason that poor people have no choices, affluent people do.

In conclusion, I would argue that environmental science has indeed had a history of simple linear relationships of the kind I have described, but in parallel there have been some sophisticated analyses done. Moving those environmental scientists who still think in this linear fashion into a more sophisticated realm requires them to understand societies and economies very much more than they do at the moment. And that is a major challenge.